


A Most Convenient Storm

by ladymerlot



Category: Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries
Genre: Breaking and Entering, Case Fic, Cheerful Bickering, Eventual Smut, F/M, First Time, Overthinking, oh my god you guys just kiss already
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-29
Updated: 2016-11-20
Packaged: 2018-07-18 23:00:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7334119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladymerlot/pseuds/ladymerlot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Phryne and Jack go searching for a mystery woman, break into a house, get trapped in a storm, talk about their feelings, and maybe even act on them. Also at some point they eat peaches. </p>
<p>Takes place in between S2E12 and S2E13.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Phryne and Jack go for a drive

**Author's Note:**

> I'm new to the MFMM fandom and to writing fic, so this is an experiment of sorts. I love and despair of these two fools. More chapters to come, hopefully soon!

The Calligan case had been resolved rather well, in Jack’s opinion. The beginning had been a mysterious fug: a spinster, with no known enemies and hardly any known friends, bludgeoned to death in her sparse apartment with a monstrously large paperweight devoid of fingerprints. The end, in contrast, was disarmingly clear: Jack had, on his desk, the signed (though not very contrite) confession of the murderer, a distant cousin who stood to benefit greatly from the death of an elderly uncle, provided that no one discovered a second will, made after the first one that would benefit him greatly, and brought it to light. Griselda the spinster with no known enemies had tried, much to her own detriment, to do just that. Hence the monstrously large paperweight, etc. etc.

“Nasty meddling old thing,” the distant cousin spat at Jack in the interrogation room. “What’s the use of a bird like that? If you ain’t going to marry and have a family and be a proper woman, what good are ya? If she’d had kids and a husband to attend to, she wouldn’t have had time to poke around in my business, would she? Should just put ‘em all down, those woman. I ain’t sorry I murdered her.”

Phryne, standing against the wall behind the distant cousin, rolled her eyes so passionately that Jack had to bite down on the inside of his cheek to keep from laughing.

Phryne had, of course, cracked the case. She had beaten Jack to the crime scene—some flimsy excuse, which Jack didn’t believe, about her hairdresser being Griselda’s neighbor—and had extricated from Griselda’s pocket a slip of paper with the cryptic phrase “March Holloway” scrawled across it. In this case, Phryne’s meddling had saved the whole thing; when the distant cousin arrived as the next of kin, and attempted, under the guise of being helpful, to insinuate himself into the investigation, the fact that no one mentioned or seemed to know anything about the cryptic March Holloway lulled him into a false sense of security, and gave Collins enough time to discover, through Hatch, Match and Dispatch, that the cryptic March Holloway was in fact a person, and a strong candidate to be the benefactor of the elderly uncle’s second will, and gave Jack and Phryne enough time to find the will and confirm the theory. After the distant cousin confessed and railed against the state of the unmarried female, the only thing left to do was to find March Holloway and inform her that she unexpectedly had made a good deal of money.

“What kind of name do you think ‘March’ is?” Phryne asked. “Do you think it’s a stage name? One doesn’t imagine holding a baby girl in one’s arms and naming her March. It’s so...aggressive.”

Jack hit a jagged patch of road and they bounced in their seats. “Perhaps her father was a military man,” he suggested. “Nostalgic for the good old days of barking commands and being obeyed. Babies don’t do that very well.”

“I should think,” said Phryne, jostling in her seat, “that if one wanted to raise an obedient child, amenable to following orders, the worst thing one could do is name her after a martial command. It’s bound to encourage resentment.”

The corner of Jack’s mouth twitched up. “Much better to name her after a classical prostitute, then?”

Phryne shot him a sideways look that ended in a pout. “I refuse to apologize for not following orders, when orders are so often silly and counterproductive. If I hadn’t, for example, gone ahead to the _Pandarus_ —”

“—there is no good reason why Collins and I wouldn’t have discovered exactly what you did, with less risk to yourself and Miss Williams and the commos,” Jack finished.

Phryne snorted and tossed her head. “With George Sanderson and Fletcher skulking around, making sure that everything out of the ordinary was concealed and smoothed over, you would have had a hard go of it. Admit it, Jack, you needed me that night. We needed each other.”

The mention of Fletcher’s name brought the night of the _Pandarus_ debacle back into Jack’s mind vividly. The memory of Miss Fisher, slumped on the deck, unarmed, Sidney Fletcher’s pistol trained at her head, still brought a sour chill to Jack’s stomach, even weeks after the event. If Jack had been a second slower, if his aim had been a little less sure, if Fletcher hadn’t taken a moment to admire the vulnerability of his pursuer—Jack had gone through every possible morbid scenario a hundred times, a thousand times, when he lay in bed and couldn’t fall asleep, or woke in the night reaching out for Phryne even though he knew she wouldn’t be there. It did only bad things to his state of mind, and even worse things to his heart.

Not that he supposed that Phryne was ignorant to the workings of his heart. How could she be, after his...display following the road rally?

Jack chose not to dwell on it. Too painful. Too raw. Too distracting when he was driving. He had already forfeited his dignity, such as it was, ten ways to Sunday, and he didn’t intend to further impugn himself by driving the police motorcar into a ditch. But it was unkind of Phryne to suggest that he wouldn’t have found the girls aboard the _Pandarus_ without her. After all, it wasn’t her lock pick that had put the wind up him—he’d already see the girl’s shoe. But when he returned to the present moment with the purpose of continuing the argument, he found Phryne had turned her attention to the growing bank of black clouds on the horizon.

“I do hope Miss March is home,” she said, ducking her head to get a better view of the clouds through the windshield. “This weather doesn’t look promising.”

“What do you mean, you hope?” Jack said. He glanced at Phryne from the corner of his eye and was annoyed to see her smirking. “I thought you called her.”

“I did call her,” Phryne said. “The line was disconnected. But that doesn’t mean she’s not at home. At this hour on a Sunday, with weather like this approaching, in the middle of the Victoria goldfields at least an hour’s drive from anything worth doing? She must be at home. And besides.” Phryne paused to place a small, light hand on Jack’s thigh; Jack fought down the strangled sound that rose in his throat at her touch. “We’re having a pleasant drive, aren’t we?”

“You may try to distract me all you like, Miss Fisher,” Jack said. He cleared his throat to rid his voice of the impertinent tremble that had suddenly appeared there. “But unlike some people, I have a certain respect for the laws of the road, and cannot be swayed.”

Lies, lies, damned lies—his heart was racing faster than he cared to think about, from a simple touch. Phryne must have known. The small, secret smile on her face as she removed her hand, though not before giving his thigh a gentle squeeze, confirmed it.

Finally, March Holloway’s home came into view: a two-story, weather-worn Arts & Crafts house, with two severe steeples guarding either side of the front door. It must have been a handsome house once, Jack thought as he parked the car and climbed out. But years had passed since anyone had applied a fresh coat of paint to the boards, or weeded the desultory beds at the foot of the porch, or straightened the shutters, or—in fact, the house looked nothing if not deserted.

“Are you sure this is the right place, Miss Fisher?” he asked Phryne as she skipped up the front steps, oblivious to the decay. Her long silk scarf ( _aubergine_ , she had informed Jack when he picked her up that morning and commented on the becoming shade of purple) fluttered behind her in the wind.

“Positive!” she called back. She rapped on the door, as there didn’t appear to be a bell, and waited. After a minute, in which there was no answer, she rapped again.

“No lights on,” Jack said, leaning back with his hands in his pockets. After a couple of moments he was obliged to take one hand out of his pocket and use it to jam his hat back onto his head. No wonder the outside of the house was in such a state—the wind howled over the fields with enough force to scrape the paint right off the wood. The black clouds that Phryne had noticed earlier seemed ominously close. For the first time, Jack wondered what he and Phryne would do if a storm hit and they were trapped outside the house.

Meanwhile, Phryne had disappeared.

Jack tore his eyes from the stormclouds long enough to look around for her, and, upon finding her studiously picking the lock on the kitchen door at the back of the house, let out his most impressive long-suffering sigh.

“Miss Fisher,” he began.

“Got it!” Phryne popped up and gave the kitchen door a push. “You can’t chastise me for this, Jack. There’s a storm coming. Don’t you see?”

“I am still a policeman, Miss Fisher,” Jack tried again, “though you seemed determined to both malign and ignore that fact.”

“Come along, Inspector!” Phryne called from the kitchen doorway. She poked her head out long enough to raise a sultry eyebrow in his direction. “Though I would dearly love to see you soaking wet.”

Jack found himself incapable of responding. Well, verbally responding. He was responding in quite another way unsuited to both a gentleman and an officer of the law, and he took a few minutes, in the relative sanctuary of the back porch, to compose himself. He couldn’t remember a time, even as a lad, when being around a woman affected him this way. It was intolerable. But being away from her—he had found that equally intolerable, and he flattered himself that Phryne had found it so too, in her own way. But that left him in an impossible position: he couldn’t leave her side, and yet touching her was torturous.

And yet, perhaps...just once...the torture would be worth it.


	2. Phryne and Jack get wet

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The titular storm makes an appearance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Much gratitude for your patience. I promise to be speedier in the future (...I hope).

To say that Phryne Fisher had known for sure that March Holloway’s house would be empty was unfair to Phryne. If she known with absolutely certainty that the house would be abandoned, if she had known without a shadow of a doubt that she would be dragging Jack Robinson out into the country, on a Sunday no less, to a vacant house miles and miles away from anything and anyone…

Well. She had only _suspected_ that the house would be abandoned, and had been for some time. And a not-insignificant part of her even hoped it would be. If she were with anyone else, excepting perhaps Mac, she would be able to argue her blamelessness vehemently and with great wide-eyed naivete. But not with Jack. Jack saw through her like no one else. Damned impertinent of him, really.

But now that they _were_ in March Holloway’s clearly abandoned home, miles and miles away from anything and anyone, might they not get up to a little mischief? It seemed like too much to hope for. Jack had stalled her and hedged and slipped through her grasp for months, even as he goaded her with his dark eyes.

_Perhaps another time, at a less dangerous hour. In a less lethal dress._

She cursed herself now for letting him walk out that door, for letting the game roll on and on with no end in sight. It was diverting, to be sure. Bantering with Jack Robinson was a gift in and of itself. But at some point, the game had to have an end. It was all well and good to flirt about her lingerie being dangerous, but how much more delicious would it have been for Jack to take that dress off of her and realize she wasn’t wearing anything underneath it at all?

March Holloway’s back door led into a sparse kitchen: a table and chairs, white glass-fronted cabinets with hardly anything in them, a small range with a rusted kettle on top. A thick layer of dust covered everything, including the floor. Phryne ran a finger over the top of the wooden table. Perhaps March had been gone longer than she’d thought.

As Jack seemed determined to defy her by staying on the porch, she wandered further into the house. A small, darkly patterned dining room, which looked like it hadn’t been used a day since the house was built, and a parlor made up the rest of the first floor. Phryne fished a newspaper from a pile by the fireplace. May 14th, 1924. None of the papers in the pile were dated later than June 1924; a good indicator of when March Holloway had abandoned the house, if that’s what she had done. Phryne straightened and looked around. Not much else to go on. The only other reading material in the room was a monumental stack of _Theatre_ Magazines under the front window. Phryne ran her eye down the spines: these, unlike the newspapers, ran back decades. Hmmm. That was something to go on.

A sudden, violent rumble of thunder jerked Phryne back to the present moment. She glanced up at the window just in time to see a sheet of marble-sized hail rain down from the black sky.

“Miss Fisher!” Jack came pounding through the house into the parlor. At some point, he had lost his hat. “You’d best help me move the car into the barn next door or we’re going to have a devil of a time getting home.”

The barn, painted the same forlorn gray as the house, stood at the back of the property, down a short dirt road grooved by tire tracks and almost overgrown with weeds. While Phryne guided the police car forward, wincing inwardly every time a piece of hail cracked against the windshield, Jack ran ahead to heave open the barn door. But the barn door, it appeared, had other ideas. It was locked.

Thus Phryne had to extricate herself from the police car and pick the admittedly flimsy but annoyingly rusted lock on the door, while Jack attempted to shield her from the hail with his coat. Then together they pulled the door open, and Phryne returned to the wheel of the car while Jack moved buckets and planks of wood and heaps of rope and other vestiges of home improvement until there was a police motorcar-sized space on the floor of the barn. Phryne guided the car inside, Jack heaved the door closed once more, and then they sprinted back to the house, harassed alternately by sprays of rain and the painful thonk of hail.

The result of this labor was that Jack and Phryne were now soaked to the skin. It was all too wonderful. Phryne couldn’t have planned any better if she had tried. She sat down at the kitchen table, laughing to herself, while Jack stripped off his overcoat and suit coat and began wrestling with his dripping tie.

“I suppose,” he grumbled, “you’re quite pleased with yourself.”

Phryne feigned innocence. “I haven’t the slightest idea what you mean.”

Jack yanked the tie from around his neck and tossed it on the table. Phryne basked in the view of the newly liberated hollow at the base of his throat. She saw it so rarely. It was like watching a orchid previously believed to be extinct bloom right before her eyes.

“You obviously came here looking for an adventure, and you’ve found one, without a thought for what the rest of us think or feel,” Jack continued. “How are we supposed to get home from here, Phryne? I can’t drive the car in this weather. The windshield will be smashed clean through and the roof will be dented beyond repair before we’re halfway back to Melbourne.”

“You surely can’t blame me for calling down the hail, Jack,” Phryne said smoothly. “My powers of persuasion, while considerable, don’t extend to the weather.” Jack, preoccupied with stripping off his waistcoat (much to Phryne’s delight) shot her an exasperated look but said nothing. “Besides, if we have to wait out the storm, we’re perfectly placed to do so. It’s not like we’re exposed to the elements. We have a roof over our heads, and a place to light a fire.” She allowed herself a lascivious grin. “And if the weather doesn’t cooperate and we have to spend the night, I’m _sure_ there is a bed in here, somewhere.”

Jack didn’t react like she expected. In fact, he didn’t react to her latest provocation at all. He looked at her for a moment, his head cocked slightly to the side, and then reached out to take the sopping and almost-sheer fabric of Phryne’s silk blouse between his fingers.

“You’re shivering,” he said softly.

So she was. Phryne hadn’t even noticed. She stood up so she was almost flush against Jack’s body; his hand curled around her bicep.

“I should get out of my wet clothes, then,” she answered. The rain had washed away Jack’s habitual pomade, and a thick lock of hair fell against his forehead. Phryne had underestimated the effect that his disheveled appearance would have on her. She considered, briefly, swooning into his arms. Not usually her style, but needs must, etc. Instead, she leaned forward until less than an inch of space remained between her lips and his, and looked up at him.

“And so should you, Inspector. As soon as possible.”

His eyes flicked down at her lips and she was certain, this time, surely he would, yes he would, he had to—but no, instead of taking her into his arms and kissing her as brutally as she wanted to kiss him, he stepped back and released her.

“Ladies first, Miss Fisher,” he said. “I’ll start a fire in the parlor while you change. March Holloway’s togs won’t be nearly as glamorous as yours, but I’m sure there’s something you could borrow that would keep you warm.” And then he melted away from her and disappeared into the parlor.

It was too infuriating. When Phryne came back downstairs, wearing March Holloway’s frumpiest flannel nightie and dressing gown, she decided a change of tactics was in order. She mentally reviewed the details of their situation as she watched Jack, his hair now drying into a disarmingly lovely mess of curls, feed the newspapers into the fire. She knew he wanted her; she saw it every time he looked at her, and felt it when he stood close enough to her: the animal heat, the sense of being tightened to the breaking point, like an abused guitar string, unable to even vibrate. She knew the feeling well: she felt the same.

It was possible he even loved her, though he hadn’t used that language. He had more or less said as much, standing in her parlor after Gertie Haynes’s death. But he made no move to romance her, took no steps to mitigate the ache he must have felt for her (or at least she hoped he did. She certainly ached for him). There was the night after the _Pandarus_ incident, which she was sure would have been something had Aunt P not unwittingly blundered into it, something great, something _wonderful_ —but she given him no reason to believe he shouldn’t try again.

“Put the man out of his misery already,” Mac had said to her a few weeks later, after a dinner party at Wardlow. “I don’t know why you string him along so. It’s cruel.”

Phryne had tried in vain to convince Mac that _she_ was the one in misery, and that if she didn’t get her hands on Jack Robinson soon, she would wither away in a state of piteous celibacy. Mac didn’t believe her when she said she hadn’t taken a man to bed since her failed tryst with Giorgos, but it was true. Thoughts of Jack had driven practically everyone else out of her mind.

She imagined, for a moment, striding over to the fireplace and taking Jack by the shoulders, laying him down on the floor, tangling her hands in his hair and straddling him and riding him until she lost her breath and her voice and the memory of her own name. She luxuriated in this delectable thought. She imagined him propping himself up on his elbows so he could put his lips to her neck.

She gasped aloud at the thought, and Jack’s head jerked around.

“All right, Miss Fisher?” he asked.

“Just a chill,” she said, hoping the light of the flames threw her face into shadow so he couldn’t see her blush.

He went back to tending the fire, bunching up newspaper and feeding it slowly and patiently into the blaze. Phryne stopped short. Her good, noble Jack. Her honorable policeman. Her dour inspector. She couldn’t seduce him wantonly and lead him into something he might regret. The choice had to be his.

“Jack, let me finish with the fire.” She knelt next to him and took the newspaper kindling from him (as much to help as to still her hands, which threatened to wander up into his delightful and unexpected curls. “You go up and find something to change into. I won’t have you catching pneumonia from those wet clothes.”

“Very well, Miss Fisher.” Jack relented and stood up, brushing the knees of his damp trousers.

“Hurry back,” Phryne trilled, and fed a strip of newspaper into the fire.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (I have decided, with no evidence except my Feelings with a capital F, that Phryne and Erik Voigt didn't sleep together. Grape-stomping is all well and good, but I don't see that town having many secret liaisons that were actually a secret. So by my calculations, Giorgos was Phryne's last romantic entanglement.)


	3. Phryne and Jack have a talk

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Phryne and Jack talk about their feelings while wearing ridiculous pajamas.

Jack was in agony.

The weather, if anything, had only gotten worse. Before night fell, Jack had ventured out to the road with a lantern, to confirm what he suspected: it was positively flooded in both directions, and to the east, in which direction they needed to travel to return to Melbourne, seemed to have disappeared entirely. Now that the sun had set and the rain continued unabated, going home was out of the question. There was nothing to do but stay in March Holloway’s house for the night, and offer up their prayers to her, wherever she was, for her hospitality.

But this state of affairs led to Jack’s dilemma: there was only one bed in the entire house.

Apparently Miss March Holloway had never entertained a guest, or hosted a family member from afar, or taken in a traveler from the wind and wild. Four sullen Chippendale side chairs stood rigidly in the dining room, but they were hardly fit for sleeping. The parlor at the front of the house contained only a stiff-backed armchair, framed in mahogany and upholstered in rough damask, and a hideously modern chaise lounge that looked like it could comfortably accommodate a large baby or a small dog.

Thus, the agony. It suddenly became of the utmost importance that he not share a bed with Phryne Fisher. It might seem odd, given that he had dreamt for several months of little else except sharing a bed with Phryne Fisher, but now that the opportunity presented itself, he would have rather taken his chances walking through the goldfields all the way back to Melbourne, apocalyptic hail or no apocalyptic hail. His only antidote to her hypnotic power, at present, was removing himself from whatever room she currently inhabited, usually her parlor, late at night, after several whiskeys. But that wouldn’t be an option if they shared a bed.

Jack brooded about it as he hunted through March Holloway’s abandoned boudoir, such as it was, for something to wear. He found, to his surprise, a pair of loose woolen trousers that just about fit him. Judging by the size of the rest of her clothes, March Holloway wasn’t a large woman, so these must have been left behind by a guest (an especially close guest, given the sleeping situation) or perhaps procured for something other than dressing. A quilt or something. Jack was much too broad to fit into any of the available shirts, so he wrapped a dressing gown around him and hoped Phryne wouldn’t comment on the triangle of his exposed chest. His dignity was barely holding up as it was.

Phryne, in the way only Phryne could, had magicked two tins of peaches and an ancient chocolate bar from the cellar. The two of them sat in the parlor, Phryne on the ridiculous chaise lounge and Jack in the armchair, eating their improvised dinner and passing a bottle of ‘11 Niebaum claret, which Phryne described as “fairly good, for an American” back and forth.

"So, Miss Fisher,” Jack said finally, “where do you think our March Holloway is?"

Phryne set down her tin and gave him a sphinx-like smile.

"Do you have any guesses, Jack?" Jack shrugged. "Could have wandered out into the goldfields on a night like this and never found her way home. Met some sort of accident." A horrible thought struck him. "Phryne, you don't think she's...her body...is still in the house?"

"Of course not! I may be a wild and unpredictable woman, Jack Robinson, but I'm not the sort to fancy spending the night with a corpse." Phryne's lip curled a little. "But I do think she's dead."

"Well, come off it, then," said Jack with a wave. "Present your evidence. Amaze me." Phryne stood and moved toward his chair. For a moment, Jack feared she would slide right into his lap--and then wondered if that was so scary after all. But she didn't; instead she handed him a _Theatre_ Magazine from May 1908, opened to a profile of a young actress.

A young actress named March Holloway.

_Though Miss Holloway avails herself of the usual entertainments popular among today's young people, she maintains a peculiar pastime: the collection of paperweights. In her flat in the suburbs of Eltham, she has over a hundred, some carved of ivory, intricate and dainty, some molded from clay and painted with extravagant colors, some acquired from foreign lands and every bit as exotic as their countries of origin. One particular set, wrought in iron, shows several panels from the Rodin masterpiece “The Gates of Hell,” in agonizing detail._

“The paper weights,” Jack said in amazement. “Griselda collected paper weights. She was killed with one.” He raised his eyes from the magazine to see Phryne grinning. “But how—unless—unless—”

“Unless Griselda the spinster was also March Holloway?” she finished.

“How could you possibly have known?” Jack was used to feeling, at least some of the time, flat-footed and a bit dull around Phryne, when her deductive powers were at full capacity, but this was on another level entirely. “Have you known the whole time?”

“Oh no, not at all. Well, I suspected March Holloway was a stage name—it’s such an unconvincing name for a regular person, don’t you think? And when I saw all these magazines, I was sure of it, but I also had a suspicion, no, not a suspicion, a hunch, that we would know March Holloway. I don’t care what that vile cousin of hers said about busybody women. Griselda wouldn’t have been poking around if she didn’t have a claim.”

“But what on earth was March Holloway doing masquerading as Griselda the spinster and putting herself in ultimately fatal danger in the first place?” Jack asked. “If she knew about the will, which she obviously did, she should have just gone to a solicitor as March Holloway and been done with it.”

“In case you haven’t noticed, Jack,” said Phryne, motioning to the surrounding room, “March Holloway left this house and her identity as a former siren of the stage long before Gregor Calligan died. The most recent newspaper in the house dates from five years ago, and though I’m not great judge of dust, I’d say the oldest layer of dust dates from five years ago as well.”

“And Calligan’s only been dead six months,” Jack said. “Then what in blazes was she doing?”

“Reuniting with an old lover,” Phryne said, as if it were patently obvious.

Jack stared. “You’re just making this up now,” he said.

Phryne laughed. She remembered the wine and took a deep swig. Jack tried and failed not to look at her throat.

“All right, you’ve caught me out. I’m not making it up, but I did cheat, just a little.” She hitched up the nightie and pulled a letter from her garter. Jack couldn’t help the crooked smile that passed over his face. Only Phryne Fisher could make that execrable nightie look as sensual as crepe de chine lingerie.

She handed him the letter, which was written in a hand he recognized from the course of his investigation as Gregor Calligan’s. It was addressed to March Holloway and dated May 26, 1924.

After Jack finished it, he sat back, floored. It appeared that Griselda and Gregor Calligan were distant cousins and had been children together. They had grown up in the same block of row houses in Sydney. He had loved her silently and powerfully for almost all of his life but never said, thinking there was no chance the feeling could be reciprocated. When his doctor told him he had a year to live, he wrote to Griselda and asked her to come to him.

“And she came,” Jack said. He couldn’t keep the wonder from his voice. “And she must have added a good three and a half years on to his life.”

The fire had burned down to a dull glow, and the rain had, for the moment, begun to slacken. Phryne had returned to the chaise lounge and sat, watching him. The meager light from the fire threw shadows across her face. She was no longer laughing.

“Can you imagine,” Phryne said softly, “loving a woman like that, for that many years, and saying nothing?”

Jack felt a slow, heavy sensation creep up his throat. “He says that he worried he would drive her away with an unwanted advance,” he said. “He feared he would lose her.”

“He lost her anyway. He lost those years he could have had with her.”

“He found her again, in the end.”

“When he was a dying man and she an old maid!” Phryne shot to her feet, pushing the chaise back with her calves so the legs screeched against the floorboards. In a quieter tone, muffled by clenched teeth, she added, “I don’t understand.”

“Perhaps he thought…” Jack found he was now standing too. “Perhaps it wasn’t an initial rejection that he feared. Perhaps he knew that Griselda would have him, and that’s what scared him. That they would come to resent each other, to hate each other, even. How many marriages have you seen fall apart?” He didn’t include, though he could have, his own marriage. “And perhaps he reasoned that it was better to keep his distance, lest he ruin not only their present relationship but also his memories of what their relationship had been.”

Phryne threw her hands up in despair. “That is no way to go through life, Jack,” she said. Her hair, dried wavy from the rain, danced when she tossed her head. “They could have fallen out over some silly little nothing and ruined the whole thing without ever declaring their feelings for one another at all. Gregor Calligan could have stepped off the kerb and gotten hit by a ‘bus. March Holloway could have fallen off the stage and broken her neck. What good would Calligan’s reticence have done them then?”

“Phryne…” Jack turned away slightly, so he didn’t have to see her face. He wasn’t sure when they had started talking about themselves instead of Calligan and Griselda, but it had happened. It was possible that they had been speaking in code for this entire trip, that everything they said, even if it was about something innocuous like passing the milk or remarking upon the weather, had meant something else for weeks now. Months. Jack felt his resolve flowing away from him like the ebbing tide.

That he wanted her was never in question, not from the first day they met in the bathroom of the horrible Andrews woman. But that he could be with her, as a lover and as—and as something more—he had barely dared imagine. What could he offer her, this fiery, mercurial, impossible, marvelous woman, who had everything she wanted and needed no one?

Phryne moved towards him, until she was close enough to touch him. She didn’t touch him. The homely nightie would have made any other woman look shy and a bit domestic, but Phryne looked neither; her eyes burned into his, encouraging, questioning. The tilt of her head said, _for God’s sake, Jack Robinson, do something._

He took her shoulders in his hands and ran his hands down the nightie until they rested on her lower back. The material was so thin he could feel the contours of her skin beneath it. To think that this entire time, while they sat in the parlor discussing March Holloway’s improbable romance and slurping peaches, Phryne was wearing hardly anything at all.

Her hands found the lapels of his dressing gown and pulled him closer. He bowed his head until his forehead rested against hers.

“You’re blushing, Inspector,” Phryne said.

“I’m a grown man, Miss Fisher.” He pushed back the edge of her nightie and pressed his lips against her shoulder. “I’m not likely to blush at the sight of a little bare flesh.”

The sound she made when his mouth touched her skin threw into question every other sound he had ever heard in his whole life. Why should any of these other sounds exist, when the sound of Phryne’s pleased gasp existed in the world?

She was so easy to touch. Damnably easy. Once he started moving his hands across her body, up into her hair so he could cup her cheeks is his palms, down to her hips so he could press her more firmly against him, he didn’t think he would ever be able to stop. Luckily, it seemed Phryne would never want him to. She had wrapped her arms around his neck and rocked forward onto her toes and kissed him recklessly, and Jack thought that if March Holloway’s house caved in on him in that moment he would die a stupidly happy man.

Phryne pulled back from him, her hair mussed, her eyes bright, her nightie askew on her shoulders. She smiled at him.

“Take me to bed, Jack Robinson,” she said.


	4. Phryne and Jack  do something other than talking

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Phryne and Jack take off the ridiculous pajamas.

He took her to bed. 

The light of the candle threw long shadows on the wall of the stairwell as Jack and Phryne climbed to the bedroom. Phryne was dizzy with anticipation; she couldn’t tell if she was shivering from cold or excitement. As they gained the landing, she skipped ahead and pulled Jack in her wake. Now that the moment was here--now that she had him, as she had so often dreamed--she couldn’t move fast enough. She was conscious, in the back of her mind, that this night was enchanted, gilded at the edges with an intangible magic that wouldn’t last through the morning. She thought of Juliet, sitting in her room and longing for night, when she would have Romeo in her bed.  _ Come loving, black-brow’d night _ ...Phryne couldn’t remember the rest. Jack would know, if she asked him. Never before had she understood Juliet, that poor love-addled little girl, so clearly; if she could have made the night last forever, she would have.  _ Stay, gentle night. Stay loving, black-brow’d night.  _

“Jack, what was the--”

Jack slid the candle onto the top of March Holloway’s trunk and grabbed her with both hands, pulling her to him and kissing her. She felt him, hard, against her hip, and the thought of Jack Robinson aroused beyond endurance made her molten inside. She felt warm, and wet, and her legs trembled. She felt like she was sixteen, a blushing, nervous virgin. She felt--she couldn’t even say what she felt. Sensations raced through her body faster than her thoughts could translate them. It was enough to say: she felt. 

“What was that?” Jack murmured against her lips. 

“Jack!” His name came out as a gasp. “I’m trying to ask you about Shakespeare.” She said this even as she fell backwards onto the bed and pulled Jack on top of her. 

“My apologies, Miss Fisher.” He dipped his head and ran his teeth along her collarbone, and, when she moved beneath him so she rubbed directly up against this erection, moaned against her throat. In a gruff voice, he said, “I’m a bit preoccupied at the moment.” 

“Miss Fisher, is it?” said Phryne. “Even now?” 

“Few other words give me more joy when I say them,” he said. He pulled back so he could look her in the face, and smiled with one side of his mouth. “Miss Fisher.” 

She liberated him from the ridiculous but pleasingly skimpy dressing gown, and took a moment to admire him by candlelight. True, she had had a glimpse of what was hidden beneath Jack’s heavy wool and many, many buttons at Queenscliff, but she hadn’t suspected that when she finally had him in her bed--or in someone’s bed, at least--she would feel so girlishly shy. So demure. It wasn’t her way, and had never been. And yet, looking at Jack, and the smudged outline of his muscles, and his sweetly mussed hair, and his eyes, black with lust or love or both, she suddenly felt unsure--not of him, but of herself. Phryne had never felt that way before, that she might not have enough to offer a lover. That she herself might not be enough. It was a ludicrous idea and she didn’t like it at all. 

“Phryne,” said Jack softly. “You’re staring at me.”

She was. She couldn’t help herself. 

“If you’ve...changed your mind…” He stopped, unsure. “We don’t have to do this, Phryne.” 

The sound of his voice, low and warm and hesitant, brought her back to herself. The slight crack in his tone as he said her name. It almost hurt inside, how much she loved this man. She thought she had cut out the part of her that was capable of love, of _this_ kind of love, and burned the space where it had been, so nothing could form there ever again. She had had to, at the time, to survive. To move on. She hadn’t mourned it. But how could she explain this--this--this wild and fertile lea that had sprung up on that scorched patch of her heart! 

“Jack.” She took his cheek in her palm and brought his face down to hers. “I don’t believe there is a woman in this world foolish enough to half-undress you and then turn you away. And if there is, I’m certainly not her.” She put her lips against his. “Although if you don’t undress me right now and touch me everywhere you possibly can, I might start to reconsider.” 

He rocked forward, capturing her head in his large hands, and kissed her so forcefully that Phryne almost lost her breath. His hands traveled down her neck, her shoulders, her breasts, her stomach, until they hitched under the hem of the nightie and pulled it off in one motion. For a moment, he seemed to lose his train of thought; he kneeled over her with the nightie balled in his hands, his eyes dark and his lips parted. As if he couldn’t look away. 

“My God, Phryne--” he growled, and then his hands were all over her again, followed by his mouth, and it was nothing like she had ever felt before. Phryne had been touched by many men, with various degrees of expertise, but never like this, never with Jack’s care, his undivided attention to exactly what Phryne wanted, what made her gasp and writhe and created pockets of exploding stars before her eyes. When his hand slid up her inner thigh and then between her legs, she almost whimpered with impatience. When he finally put his mouth on her and ran his tongue over her clit, she almost fainted. 

“Jack.” She could barely speak. “Jack, I need you…”

His voice came from somewhere near her stomach: “I’m here.” 

“Inside me, Jack.”

He put his forehead against her hipbone and chuckled. The sound traveled through her in waves and made her ache. 

“God, Jack--”

Outside, the rain continued to pound against the eaves and batter the casements, and the wind howled, and the trees creaked, but Phryne Fisher was aware of nothing but the feeling of Jack Robinson, the smell of him, the taste of him, enveloping her utterly. 

And she would have been happy to stay that way until the end of time. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I AM SO SORRY THIS TOOK SO LONG TO POST. Over the summer I blamed my slowness on my friends who kept marrying each other and inviting me to their faraway weddings, but once I continued to not work on this through the fall, I realized the problem was just....me. But after spending this weekend bedridden from a cold brought on by excessive wallowing after a certain American Event, I figured I might as well just finish this darn thing and post it, because life is short and scary and you should post all the smut you can while you can. 
> 
> Please excuse any typos.


End file.
